I'm the opposite — I *don't* want comments indexed because at the moment most search engines treat the guest's words and links as being my own. - Amit Patel

Now that JavaScript is required for so many web sites, it seems odd that search engines are stuck looking at the static, served HTML. - Bill Strathearn

I'd be afraid of search engines executing Javascript and indexing produced HTML. On the other hand, if it requests a PHP page, there's execution of code and generation of HTML, so that seems pretty similar. It's just a matter of where the code is executed. Maybe Google Caja makes it okay to run the Javascript in their crawlers. - Amit Patel

Amit, isn't that particularly a concern with snippets? I know that's a challenging and frustrating issue! But in many cases, I've seen the content of comments for one of my blog entries to be not only substantially more voluminous but also, frankly, often more interesting than the entry itself, and it's clear that I end up getting a lot of relevant & high quality traffic to these entries from search engines *because* of those spiderable comments. - Adam Lasnik

Should you receive "credit" (in the form of traffic) for another persons writing? - EricaJoy

A more relevant question, IMHO, is whether the content is an appropriate match for a given search query. If someone searches for "etrade problems" and there are a ton of people ranting about specific problems about etrade in one of my blog entries, isn't that page likely a good result for that query? The idea of "credit" I believe is outdated. Who should receive "credit" for wikipedia entries? Or, even crazier, for forum pages, in which practically none of the content is written by the "owner" of the forum? ;) - Adam Lasnik

WRT "credit" being outdated, the fact remains that people are doing any and everything in the hopes of generating more traffic for their sites (hello entire SEO industry). Now, I am most certainly a fan of having relevant information surfaced in search results, however, I would prefer the relevant information show up directly instead of having to read through your blog post, then a bunch of other comments to get to the comment I want. In a perfect world, each searchable comment would have its own page (a la twitter) with a link back to the main post (rel nofollow) that had all the rest of the comments. It would also have a link back to the main authors site, minus the rel nofollow. That way the author establishes themselves as a quality commenter, rather than your blog being established as a quality site. With this, only your own words affect the quality and ranking of your site. - EricaJoy

I see your point, but I respectfully disagree with both the premise and solutions. In particular, I feel that there's a high correlation between high quality comments and high quality original posts; it typically takes dedication and thoughtfulness for a blogger to create and maintain a strong community, so in that way, why shouldn't he or she get some "credit" for others' postings (so, too, with a forum). Also, I feel that your solution would too painfully remove context and flow. - Adam Lasnik

(with that said, though, I understand and appreciate your frustration with regards to creating crap "content" just to rank, e.g., blackhat SEO. And in this regard, I think search engine efforts to better identify and reward quality authorship is a good thing in the long run). - Adam Lasnik

True about creating a community on a blog and maybe there needs to be some way of measuring and indexing activity on a website where activity is measured by comments or some other method of engagement (poll votes, etc). - EricaJoy from IM

Little did I realize, I was describing Backtype! They already do exactly what I describe wrt comments. http://www.backtype.com/EricaJo... - EricaJoy